Chinese Exclusion Act

CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT

When gold was discovered in California in 1848, few laborers were available for the new mining industry and many looked to China as a ready source of workers. Inexpensive transportation across the Pacific Ocean, acceptance of low wages, willingness to tackle dangerous jobs, and a strong work ethic made the Chinese attractive to mine operators. Brokers paid passage expenses for the Chinese laborers' transportation and the laborers repaid them from their earnings. In 1852 alone more than 20,000 Chinese arrived in California almost exclusively from the Guangdong province of southern China (including the city of Canton.) Within a few years of the gold discovery, the Chinese population was an important part of California's labor force. On their own initiative, the Chinese reworked the spoils left by earlier mining operations, recovering previously overlooked gold .

Other work became available in the ensuing years, including construction of the transcontinental railroad and increased employment in agriculture and manufacturing. By the 1880s approximately 100,000 Chinese were in the United States, more than 90 percent of them males. The vast majority sent their wages home regularly, maintaining a goal of eventually returning to their homeland and families.

As the white population grew in the West, particularly after completion of the railroad, competition for jobs increased and hostility from whites mounted. A downturn in the economy during the early 1870s led to declining wages; persecution of the Chinese escalated. New trade unions devised tags for goods to identify those made by white laborers and those made by Chinese. Violence directed towards Chinese also increased; nineteen Chinese were killed in a mob incident in Los Angeles in 1871 and more were killed in 1877 during a San Francisco riot. Later in 1877, San Francisco businessman Denis Kearney (who was himself an immigrant from Ireland) formed the Workingman's Party of California which spearheaded the anti-Chinese movement.

Although Chinese comprised far less than one percent of the U.S. population, politicians reacted to voter demands by joining those who blamed the immigrants for economic ills. Seeking to restrict further competition from Chinese workers, Congress passed the Fifteen Passenger Act limiting Chinese immigration in 1879. However, President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877–1881) vetoed the bill claiming it violated the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China. The following year the United States negotiated a new treaty with China, permitting immigration restrictions for laborers but exempting foreign travelers, students, teachers, and merchants.

With the new treaty in place, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 suspending Chinese labor immigration for ten years and making Chinese immigrants ineligible for U.S. citizenship. The act was the first major law restricting immigration of a specific nationality into the United States. Chinese in the United States unsuccessfully challenged the new law as discriminatory. Persecution continued and 28 Chinese mine workers, refusing to join a strike, were killed in Rock Springs, Wyoming, in September of 1885. Congress extended the Exclusion Act in 1892 for another ten years, and in 1902 made the exclusion indefinite following a new, more restrictive treaty with China in 1894. In 1904 China refused to renew the 1894 treaty. Continuing immigration restrictions by the United States led to a boycott of U.S. goods in China in 1905.

The series of exclusion acts proved very effective in limiting immigration. The Chinese population substantially declined. The immigration acts were supplemented with other laws restricting the work activity of Chinese living in the country. In 1913 California passed a law prohibiting Chinese from owning land. Chinese people still entered the country but in smaller numbers, often using fraudulent papers to pose as merchants. Another "loophole" allowed Chinese-born children of U.S. citizens to gain entrance and citizenship. From 1910 to 1940, San Francisco's Angel Island was a point of entry where U.S. immigration officials examined "papers" of tens of thousands of Chinese trying to enter the country, much as Ellis Island in New York City served to process European immigrants.

The Chinese population quietly persevered through generations of persecution and consistently avoided conflict. Socioeconomic effects of the persecution included formation of self-contained communities, insulated from the dominant white Western society. "Chinatowns" grew within several large cities of the West and the Chinese established their own schools, printed their own newspapers, and formed their own banks. But the overall effectiveness of the Exclusion Acts led to later efforts to restrict immigration of other groups as well, including East Indians, Japanese, and Middle Easterners.

World War II (1939–1945) was a key catalyst in changing sixty years of discriminatory U.S. policies against the Chinese. China was an ally of the United States throughout the war. China's leader, General Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), was highly respected and the United States supported Chiang in his fight against internal (Mao Zedong and the Communists) and external (Japan) threats. This closer relationship helped change U.S. policy at home regarding Chinese-Americans.

Higher paying industrial employment opened up to the Chinese-Americans, whose population numbered 60,000 in the 1930s. With anti-Chinese sentiment dissipating, Congress repealed the Exclusion Act in 1943. It was immediately replaced with strict quotas limiting Chinese immigration in favor of Europeans, but these quotas were repealed in 1965 as the status of Chinese-Americans continued to improve. By 1970 most working Chinese-Americans held white-collar jobs and were well integrated into the U.S. economy.

Topic overview

At least a thousand (Chinese) perished in building the (Central Pacific) roadbed. . . . But they worked so hard and so well that hundreds more were hired. In 1869 a group of Chinese and Irish workers laid a record ten miles of track in just under 12 hours, though the Chinese and their sacrifice were barely mentioned in the flossy speeches that year when the historic meeting of the rails was celebrated.

donald d. jackson, smithsonian, february 1991

See also: Ellis Island, Immigration, Transcontinental Railroad

FURTHER READING

Chan, Sucheng, ed. Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

McKee, Delber L. Chinese Exclusion Versus the Open Door Policy, 1900–1906: Clashes Over China Policy in the Roosevelt Era. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1977.

Takaki, Ronald T. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston: Little Brown, 1989.

Wong, K. Scott, and Sucheng Chan, eds. Claiming America: Constructing Chinese American Identities During the Exclusion Era. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.